This summer, I'm getting 1:1 ready with simple tips, tricks, and discoveries for the blended classroom. We return in the fall (well, summer, really--90+ degree August hardly qualifies as fall) to a shiny Chromebook in each student's hand and a skeptical furrow on each teacher's brow.

My goal is to make the impending transition as painless as possible by being 1:1 ready. So far, I've been looking at the possibilities of using Google Forms to enrich student assessment and to make our lives as teachers simpler.

This week I want to look at using an absolutely free Google extension to flip your class. So let's see how to...

Use Screencastify and Flip!

Technology enables teachers to stand the traditional classroom on its head. There is no longer a need to spend an entire class delivering content to students. Instead, we can flip our classrooms, or deliver content to students outside of class. That frees up class time for projects, remediation, and extension.

If your students don't have access to technology at home, or if flipping just doesn't work for you, then try using Screencastify to create content stations for a station rotation model. Have one station for content delivery, one station for extension, and one station for remediation/enrichment. Honestly, this is probably the way I'll use Screencastify most of the time.

I prefer it to any of the other screencast tools I've tried because it's incredibly simple, and you don't need to download any other programs to use it.

Below I made an infographic and, of course, a screen cast with Screencastify demonstrating how to get started.

Have you used Screencastify, or do you think you will? Leave a comment below, and let me know!

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I'm spending my summer break getting 1:1 ready. Each and every one of my students will show up for class this fall armed with a brand new, glistening Chromebook.

This is happening to me. Me. The great lover of foldables, coloring, cloze notes, and good old fashioned interactive notebooks. But I learned a long time ago that if you don't roll with the punches, you end up with cracked ribs. That's not fun. It makes coughing painful and breathing just plain hard.

So my rule is always to roll with those punches--I don't like to hurt. But I'm not abandoning pen and paper and good old-fashioned stuff, oh my. You can read all about my take on this HERE.

But as I've said many times, when the digital works best, I'm going with it. It does make my life easier--no copying, cutting, stapling, pasting (I have a headache just mentioning these things). Plus (and arguably most importantly), students need to develop practical technological skills outside of snap-chatting and texting.

And one time that the digital works best for sure is with creating self-grading quizzes.

When I first started using Google Forms to generate quizzes, I learned a code to use in Google Sheets that would make the quizzes self-grading. There were a lot of steps there, and it almost wasn't worth it. But then somebody came up with the free Add-On Flubaroo that does all of that for you. It's super easy. I was sold.

Here's How it Works:

First, go to Forms, and create a quiz. If you're a newbie to this, no worries, just check out this video blogto see how to open a Form and create a quiz.

After you've created your quiz, follow these steps:

The implications for using Forms and Flubaroo as formative assessment are astounding. I've used it to group students and re-group them according to their progress on any specific day. Remediation in small, targeted groups is actually practical now that we don't have to grade everything by hand (as we either forgo sleep or feeding our children dinner that doesn't come with a toy).

What are your tips for being 1:1 ready this fall? What would you like to hear more about? Leave a comment below to let me know.

I will be posting 2016's first hometown tourist edition next week, but this week I want to focus on my first 1:1 Ready post (and I will be posting them all summer).

One of the greatest things ever about Google Drive is Google Forms. I use them all the time, and I have many colleagues who use them. Last week, I presented at the Tech Summit for my county (my topic was Interactive Notebooks in the Digital Classroom--you can check out the presentation HERE).

Before I presented, I sent out one of my quizzes in Forms to my department so that their answers could provide a sample demonstration for me. They are some of the most wonderful people I've ever worked with, and they were more than happy to help. The responses I got back made me realize that most of them don't know how to make a Google Forms quiz multi-media.

"How did you insert that image?"

"How did you get that film in there?"

I made a quick tutorial for them that I'm going to share here.

Inserting pictures and films is an immensely useful feature in forms, so this week's 1:1 Ready tip is all about how to make your Forms Multi-Media. It's surprisingly easy to do.

Go into your Google Drive, and open a new form. Follow the example below to add images and films.

It's as simple as that--thank you, Google! ;) Here's a video tutorial, in case you want to dig deeper.